March 23, 2017
Researchers at The University of Kansas Cancer Center recently received an R01 grant to advance their work, Targeting Kinesin Family Member 15 for the Treatment of Cancer. The study is being funded with a three-year, $1.8 million grant. Principal Investigators Andrew K. Godwin, PhD, Anuradha Roy, PhD, and Frank Schoenen, Ph.D., will lead the research.
More than two-thirds of all women diagnosed with epithelial ovarian cancer will die from the disease, a statistic that has not changed in three decades. The standard treatment for patients with epithelial ovarian carcinoma (EOC) is initial debulking surgery followed by carboplatin-paclitaxel combination chemotherapy. Unfortunately, even with effective frontline chemotherapy, most patients with advanced EOC relapse and die as a result of resistant disease. The five-year overall survival remains around 45 percent for all stages (27 percent for distant disease). The studies proposed will identify new therapeutic options, with an end-goal of improving survival of women with ovarian cancer who have progressed on frontline therapies and have little hope for a cure.